


There's No Place ((ABANDONED))

by blacknoise



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-01-09
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2017-11-24 06:08:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/631291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blacknoise/pseuds/blacknoise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Uchiha Obito became a monster in order to save the world. What's left for him after the "end" is another journey, harder and more personal than anything he's faced to date. (Selectively divergent; Obito survives the war. The Kage of the past were never resurrected. Kaguya is--thankfully--a nonentity.)</p><p>(Go read Diplopia, the first in my Into Focus series. The prologue of TNP killed me--worst writer's block of all time.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. For Dreamers (Prologue Part 1)

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to be a long, ongoing project of mine. I'm still on the hunt for a beta, if anyone's down for the job.
> 
> A note for credit: I did search for a long time for a way to refine Kakashi's muse; he was--and continues to be--quite elusive. I was fortunate to have met Rose, with whom I built and evolved this story to its present state. We've since parted ways, but if you do ever see this, Rose, know that your contribution was greatly appreciated, and that it was fun worldbuilding with you.

 

 

Uchiha Obito tore the world apart to build a new dream.

He ripped a demon from the heart of the moon to dissolve reality itself.

He sold his heart, mind, and soul to the devil, and all he asked for was utopia in return. For a chance to move forward. To forget.

The Moon’s Eye Plan was all he’d dreamed of for eighteen long years. It was to be a final end and the promise of a new beginning. A chance to forget the loss, the pain—all of it. It was all finally within his grasp. And Madara wanted him to die for it. To resurrect him and sacrifice his own life in the process. Obito had played along for as long as he possibly could. The army outside was reorganizing. Naruto had refused him yet again, even as his comrade bled out and died from Obito’s attack. There’d be no convincing them—any of them, it seemed—to just wait and see.

Inside, in the  _ Kamui _ dimension, the habitual silence rang loud now with the clash of blades. Obito’s skin and hair was singed and stinging with residual electricity, and a fresh gash on his cheek bled freely for a moment--just a moment, until his body healed it away. Despite his frustration, which had begun to verge on desperation, just now, his blood was singing. A savage grin split his face and he lunged for Kakashi again, channeling decades of fury into his dance.

The endgame never left his mind for a moment, but he allowed himself to embrace the nostalgic rhythm they had fallen into unconsciously. Their fight had the same flow as their childish sparring, but hit so many times harder, moved so much faster. He was keeping up with Hatake Kakashi and more.

Each hit drove the next. Obito rained down blows while Kakashi, so clearly still disoriented and upset by the revelation of Obito’s identity, worked hard to parry. Despite what Kakashi likely thought, however, this was far bigger than him. Even bigger than Rin.

They broke apart for a moment, and Obito could see the resolve hardening in Kakashi’s eyes. He was going to do it. Perfect.

Kakashi charged, lightning crackling in his hand. Obito leapt a split second later, chasing that ozone-scented buzz in the air. He brandished a chakra rod in his right hand, tapered now to a wicked point, and let Kakashi see every last bit of the violence he’d stewed in for eighteen years in his bared teeth, his wild eyes. 

They collided at the same time. Obito felt the jolt-and-give of his rod slipping in just beneath Kakashi’s ribs on the right, just as Kakashi’s electrified kunai hit home, lancing into his heart. It should have hurt. Instead he felt a quickly spreading numbness, and a weakness as the air tumbled from his lungs. Kakashi made a pained grunt and fell to the side, dropping heavily to his knees as Obito slid backward off his arm. It was impossible to breathe, getting hard to see, even, but he had to move and move quickly if he was going to make this happen. Blood dribbled down his chin as he triggered his Sharingan and slipped back into the outside world, leaving Kakashi behind.

 

 

As his feet hit the surface of the Juubi’s body, he stumbled. His legs wobbled dramatically and he fell to his knees. He wanted to gasp, but couldn’t. Even with his enhancements, his body was falling apart. 

He’d have to become the Juubi’s Jinchuuriki himself, Madara be damned, and there wasn’t much time left before neither of them would be able to seal the beast into themselves and all would be lost. He focused his energy, every last Senju cell, into the beast, reeling at what he felt. It was like staring into an abyss. He shivered despite himself and prepared to take the plunge, calling to mind the series of seals he’d committed to memory.

“You always  _ were _ a fool,” Madara declared from beside him.

Obito turned his head sharply, but before he could respond, Madara’s eyes flashed, and Obito felt a wave of gut-deep horror as his body went utterly still. A snickering, oily-black presence took over the right half of his body.  _ Black Zetsu--! _ He could feel chakra warping his vision, forcing his hand. Madara’s genjutsu overwhelmed him entirely. His mind staggered under the thick, overpowering miasma of Madara’s power, and, despite fighting against it with every ounce of power he had, his hands began to move, puppetlike, through the series of seals that would begin the Rinne Tensei jutsu.

The wind was whipping, screaming shrill, and above the sound of it, Madara gloated. “What did I tell you about haste, you idiot child?” Madara’s smile widened slowly and took on a cruel edge. “Look what you've done to yourself. I’ve been playing this game for decades before you were born. You showed your hand  _ far _ too early.”

The Juubi bucked and thrashed beneath him, and Obito’s blood pounded in his ears. Madara’s power was like fingers tightening across his throat, but the connection of Hashirama’s cells to the Juubi’s body remained. Kakakshi had disrupted the seal that bound Madara’s will to his. He could take the plunge, if only he had the strength.

 

He may never have been the pride of his clan, may never have had the power to stand on equal footing with Uchiha Madara, but he was an Uchiha nonetheless. So, pushing all his energy into his one Sharingan, going lightheaded with the strain of it, Obito dug in his heels and forced back against the oppressive chakra. If he had one thing, one scant advantage, it was his own living body and Madara’s reluctance to see it harmed, at least until he could be revived completely. But his hands were still forming the wrong seals. His stolen Rinnegan throbbed in his eye-socket, ready to act. His lifeblood coursed down his chest and back. He could hear Madara snarl in alarm. There wasn’t time to think, no time to do anything but open his chakra to the beast and hope and  _ hope— _

The nearest comparison he could make was to drowning. His footing rushed out from under him. Unlike in water, though, the overwhelmed feeling suffused every cell in his body. There was a sudden, massive disconnect, like he had been cast aside and something much bigger instead had occupied his body. Distantly, he felt his eyes throbbing, aching. But then even that shattered, and Obito succumbed to another being within his flesh, growing by the moment, healing his wounds, then stretching his skin from within. 

Obito felt overfull, unstable--his body new and hard like diamond but boiling, writhing just inside his edges. Strange, after having been so empty just moments before. The beast was immense. It corroded everything within, burning through every molecule that held him together.

Somewhere at the edge of his perception, a great stalk grew skyward and began to bud.

He registered the desperate onrushing ninja army, realizing that in an instant they had recognized the threat he now posed. He registered the tiny wrinkle in time-space that signaled Kakashi’s return to the outer world.

The monster turned Obito’s head to the moon, and a slow, reptilian smile stole across its lips.

The great flower blossomed.

 

Infinite Tsukiyomi descended on the world. Obito had blinked, and in the blinking of his eyes felt a pull, a deep, soul-sucking draw on his chakra--even buffered as it was by the nigh-infinite of the Juubi--then, as his eyes opened again, he was met with a world soaked in red.

The sky glowed faintly, a dark bloody red in the light of a red, red moon. Across the battlefield, all was suddenly still and silent; the amassed shinobi army was, to a man, sitting still on the ground, eyes cast skyward, reflecting the crimson light. Focusing his gaze downward, he saw Uzumaki Naruto in the midst of the squadron, the bright blaze of his chakra guttered down to a faint ember-like glow like the rest of them. He saw Hatake Kakashi—and ignored the slight surge of bile that came with looking at that face—twitching minutely, fingers, wrists, feet and neck. But he sat like the rest. The red washed out the details of his eyes and bled into his hair. The land around them was cast in monochrome, transformed into an utterly alien landscape in the space of a moment. A gust of wind swirled by, dusty and cool, and Obito wondered,  _ is what victory feels like? _

The Juubi in him was still, yearning, driven to the moon. Madara—the dead husk that Madara inhabited, anyway—was immobile, staring up vacantly with his mouth slack like everyone else below. The slight smile continued to tug at the corner of Obito’s mouth. Finally.

He took another look around at reality, arrested as it was now. Ended. Perfect.

It was now that he finally stood on the edge, marveling that he’d truly subjugated the world and was on the verge of getting the only thing that he had wanted for years, that he felt a twinge of apprehension. This was a step into the unknown, and as much as he feared it, he hungered for it with everything he had. The Juubi swallowed his fear away into the vastness of itself, nullifying everything. Shrouded in an alien calm, Obito breathed deep in the twilight of the world he knew and loathed. He looked skyward until the red, red moon was the only thing he could see. He let go.

 

\--

 

He could hear a girl’s voice singing.

He knew this melody if he thought back hard enough; it was a simple children’s song about a firefly with a rich father, and he remembered hot summer afternoons by the Nakano river, honouring the dead with floating paper lanterns, gorging on okonomiyaki and dango and fire-roasted squid, watching the fireflies take wing amidst embers as evening descended on the woods.

He remembered his festival yukata had itched horribly, and in that remembering he found himself scratching at his arms, and at his back. Obito looked down, and he was wearing the severe black and navy blue thing that he’d hated so, the “festive” attire of the austere Uchiha men. He looked up, and the sky was deep, starry blue above him, and fiery oranges and reds toward the horizon. The trees were tall and thick, parting around the width of a river.

They passed a few children with their families. Obito recognized the Third Hokage with his young son, and his eyes caught sight of a little boy with a shock of bright silver hair, borne giggling on the shoulders of a tall, rangy man who could only be his father.

His heart caught in his throat when he saw the singer, and for a long time his mind grappled, struggling, with  _ why _ . It was a girl perched on a rock that jutted into the river’s slow current. Her yukata was a lush green and her hair a rich brown. She sang softly, ostensibly to herself, yet the sound carried sweet and clear to Obito’s ears.

_ Over there the water is bitter, _

_ But here the water is sweet! _

_ Come, come, come, firefly! _

She reached down to the water, a lit paper lantern in hand. Her arms were short and thin, and she had to press her small body flat against the rock to make the lantern touch the surface. Orange light reflected back from the dark river, and cast her face in a warm, inviting light. Fireflies danced lazily above her head like a natural halo.

Obito felt an intense urge to call her by name, but he found that he didn’t know what that name was. But he glanced at her delicate wrists, the curve of her neck, and he wondered if that strange, curling, near-nauseous feeling might be what the bigger kids called a crush. She was pretty—lovely, really—with her big eyes and her slightly sad half-smile—he really wanted to go over and say hello.

Obito took one step in her direction, then felt a vicious jerk on his right arm. He turned and looked up, and up to see his father’s stern, scowling face looking back down at him.

“Don’t get distracted, boy. I have to meet some of the other officers over there,” he said, tossing his chin in the direction of some park benches beyond the food stalls.

Obito’s sister, Hisako, held firmly in their father’s other arm, giggled, reaching her arms up toward the fireflies. “’taru!” she cried, not quite three years old and enjoying being able to mangle a new word. Obito followed his father dutifully, but he craned his neck so he could continue to watch the little brown-haired girl as long as he possibly could. He saw her get to her feet and go running back into her parents’ waiting arms.

The lantern had joined the others and was now floating downriver in Obito’s direction. With one squinting glance back over his shoulder, he made out the characters, black against the glowing paper, which read  _ Nohara _ .

Obito smiled a little to himself. He’d have to remember that name.

\--

Hisako had drowned in that same river on the eve of her third birthday.

Obito had killed his father himself. 

Nohara Rin was dead.

Rin was dead.

And Kakashi had—

Rin was  _ dead _ .

\--

Obito awoke in the dark of his bedroom, his heart hammering in his chest. Outside his window, the moon was high in the sky, though it and most of the stars were obscured by a thin film of cloud. His breath was loud and harsh in the dark, and the only other sounds were the faint scratching of the family cat using its litter-box, and the quiet  _ drip, drip _ of the leaky faucet in the bathroom down the hall.

As he gulped for air, he tried to remember what had startled him out of sleep so abruptly, but, as with most dreams, the memory faded more and more with each passing moment.

Tomorrow would be his first day at the Academy. He’d dreamed of the day ever since he could  _ say  _ the word ninja; he was going to do his clan proud and become the first Uchiha Hokage. People would look to him in admiration. He’d be the strongest shinobi since the Sage of Six Paths. A hero. A new legend.

But first, he had to get through his first day. And just then, with his hands shaking and a lingering disquiet thrumming through him, he got the feeling it wouldn’t be as easy as he’d imagined.

Just then, for a fraction of a second, the moon seemed very, very red.

\--

_ It was incomplete. _

_ It was unstable. _

_ And ‘not good enough’ just didn’t manage to fully describe the extent of failure that Obito felt then, deeper than his bones and heavier than lead. And he didn’t know— _

\--

He shouldn’t have spent so much time getting Old Man Akimichi up the stairs to his apartment that morning. He should have gotten up earlier. He should have moved faster—but instead here he was, running hard until his lungs felt raw, dirty and sweating through the new clothes his father had grudgingly bought for his first day.

Obito was late, and he ran and ran as though something was chasing him. He had to make it to the Academy on time, or—

\--

_ This dream was never yours to make. _

_ You gullible fool. _

\--

He skidded round the corner, gasping for breath, and out onto the main street. To his dismay, he heard the voices and soon saw the crowd of new Academy recruits, high pitched and laughing—

\--

_ They’re just kids _

_ We’re sending them to their deaths _

\--

And he saw their faces, their proud, smiling faces, and he hurried forward

\--

_ to see them drenched in blood _

_ faces, hands, _

_ the despair of a life at war _

\--

to join them, to finally start his journey toward becoming the greatest ninja in a generation. Obito was so excited; he only hoped he wasn’t too late.

He caught up to them, panting, and the silver-haired kid in the half-mask had to make a snide comment, had to do his part to add to Obito’s already considerable embarrassment. Obito turned to scowl at him when a pair of small, delicate hands—long-fingered and with thin white little wrists—thrust a parcel in his direction, with all the enrollment documents, all the things to take home to his dad, and Obito was stunned for a second; amazed that anyone would think to do something so kind just for him. He looked at the good Samaritan, and he swore his heart skipped a beat.

It was the Nohara girl from before, the one wreathed in candlelight and fireflies. It was

_ Rin _

_ (and blood, a river of blood, blood raining down from above) _

_ Rin _

_ (a shattered vase, scattered flowers, a demon’s roar) _

_ Rin _

_ (war, destruction, despair) _

And Nohara Rin—he knew her now—smiled, bright as the sun. Obito’s world seemed to tilt on its axis, awash in a strange, pervasive kind of bliss. She giggled a little, and that was when Obito noticed the reddish foam building in the corners of her mouth. She started to speak, and Obito watched in horror as blood bubbled out of her mouth and all down her front. He glanced down, following the path of the blood until his eyes fixed on something that made his own blood run cold. There were screams now, echoing like background noise, and the sky turned darker and darker and dark, wet red began to spread outward from Rin’s chest. From a hole that widened and widened until the white of her shattered ribs stood out bright amidst the rest of the gore. Obito heard the whimper of a small, terrified child, only belatedly realizing that that child was him. Deep darkness was closing in. With a flicker like a candle in breeze, the sun went out. And Rin was laughing. Rin was smiling. Rin was bleeding out; pale and frail and dying. Her eyes were dead and flat, but her laughter didn’t end. All the children laughed, then, laughed with milked-over eyes and blue lips and a thousand bleeding wounds. Obito sank to his knees, bringing his shaking hands up to cover his ears, his eyes—whatever he could. Terror paralyzed him though he wanted so desperately to run. And the moon rose, peering down like an immense eye, and that eye burned grim, certain red.

The fine hairs on the back of his neck rose suddenly, a cold shock yanking him out of his terrified stupor. Obito knew then, was certain beyond any doubt, that he’d failed somehow.

_ How could it have _

“Haste and an incomplete jutsu,” Rin said, “Cowardice and deceit.” Obito looked up from the false safety of his hands, and Rin stood over him, decomposing before his eyes with a smell that make him gag.

“Rin—” Obito pleaded, eyes watering.

“Remember now?” she said, her voice croaking sweetly, her flesh graying and pulling and coming off in strips, “All the things you did, all the people you destroyed?”

He felt a voracious pull somewhere just behind his navel, felt the rush of power leaving his body. Hadn’t he done everything right? Hadn’t he done all he could? Where had he gone wrong?

The Juubi’s grip on his body faltered, and it felt like dying.

“Please, please—”

_ This isn’t my dream _

“Did you really think there’d be a happy ending for a murderer like you? Did you think I’d be  _ proud _ of you for what you’ve done? Welcome you with open arms?” She was bleeding skeleton with hair at this point, eyes rolling blind in their sockets as she reached for his throat. “Who could love a monster like that? Like you?”

Obito clung stupidly to the white apron around her hips, sobbing and begging incoherently, stunned at how real the fabric felt, familiar in the very midst of his undoing.

“In a dream, everything goes the way you want,” Rin rasped, crumbling to mold and dirt all over him, dust raining down on his head and his hands, “In a dream, the dead can come back to life.” Suddenly, Obito heard a deep rumble overhead, the deeply entrenched dread slamming through him as, impossibly, rocks began to rain down on him from above.

Then his body was awash with pain, without any sweet numb paralysis, without the mercy of shock—just live-wire pain over every last inch of him, crushing him while fear stunned him into silence.

And Rin was dust in the air.

And he heard from everywhere around him (except within, where it belonged) a demon’s ghastly roar—and Madara’s laughter, mocking and taunting.


	2. To Run (Prologue 2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The false dream continues.

Obito measured time in broken breaths, in the wet and rattling gasps he made. He breathed around crushed bones, flattened lungs. His tongue wet dry lips, and yet he could feel loosened teeth shoved back deep into his mouth, hard like stones around pulverized gum and cheek. His lip split open halfway to his chin. Sharp edges, ridges of rock, skewering his liver, mauling his right kidney and grinding his leg—shoving the knee joint backward. Obito felt the throb, the ice-pick ache of a skull fractured—and none of the adrenaline or severed nerves to lend him any relief.

The dust and grit sifted into his nose, his mouth, his ears. It stung at his eyes. All this was eclipsed, though, wholly and completely, by a pain that dug deeper than any mere phyisical feeling could.

He was shivering—shivering so hard that he was very nearly convulsing.

Madara was there.

Madara was everywhere, with a voice as deep as the roots of the earth and as vast as the vault of the sky.

“In a dream,” Madara said, and Obito knew the words by heart, had whispered them to himself every night for eighteen years, “everything goes the way you want.” And Madara had become the toxic air that Obito’s pulverized lungs struggled to catch. Madara was present in time, in space.

A lone tear crept its way out of Obito’s empty eye (where was the Rinnegan, he wondered dimly—where was the sense— _ where was _ —). His fingers twitched futilely, and he wanted nothing more than to scream.

“In a dream,” Madara prompted, and by no will of his own, Obito’s ruin of a jaw moved to answer, bone grinding against bone.

“The dead can come back to life…” Obito croaked, and a fat, viscous bubble of blood rose in his throat to spatter onto his lips and face. He breathed, but he couldn’t breathe. He cringed, but he couldn’t move.

“And I  _ am _ alive,” Madara murmured reflectively. He glimmered strangely, bone white all over. “I’ve become all things—all places—all thought. This world and everything in it is mine.”

_ And what will you do? _ Obito wondered, though within he was screaming  _ how, how, how— _

“Rule,” Madara said, and there was a smile in his voice, glee and an unctuous sort of pleasure. Obito didn’t have it in him to marvel that Madara was reading his thoughts as though he were speaking aloud. “Rule every last inch of the earth, as is my birthright.”

Obito should have known. He should have realized that Madara would have predicted even this—considered every possibility, every chance of betrayal. That he’d still be one step ahead in the end.

“You’ve outlived your purpose, Obito,” Madara whispered, and a heartbeat later Obito felt ghostly fingertips skim across his skull, pressing cruelly into the pits and divots where the fractured bone sliced inward. And the world was unimaginable pain, and the nearly physical sense of Madara’s exultation. “I want you to see your good work before I erase every memory of you from my perfect reality.”

The pain abruptly receded to a maddening background hum, and Obito found himself suddenly whole and standing upright, though he was still racked with tremors, part anguish and part miserable dismay.

“I said that one day you’d thank me, didn’t I?” and now the voice, both nearer and farther away, had a source—it was right behind him. Obito whirled around to see Madara there, tall and terrible, with a smile that showed too many teeth. “Look at this world. Look what has been made possible.”

Obito thought he knew what hell looked like, having met it eighteen years ago on a waterlogged field, with that shrill ringing in his ears and only the sound of his own breath for company. With love itself lying still and cold—heart ripped out, voice stilled forever. He thought he knew hell in the rain of blood and broken bodies, in the aftermath of crushing rage. That hell was loneliness and despair—that hot, familiar anguish that had sparked and stoked his fury for so long.

This was not that hell.

“Look all around you, Obito. Tell me what you see.” Obito stiffened; Madara was pressed in close behind him, hissing in his ear. Madara’s hand curled around the back of his neck and tightened. “Look,” he urged again.

Obito looked—because suddenly they stood on the edge of a high, high cliff. They looked down upon a crimson valley, endless rows of people swaying like reeds in the breeze. They were wet—Obito could see that clearly, even from so great a distance. They glistened, sticky with gore in the deep gloom. Organized in formation, he saw—an army of mindless bodies.

“What is this?” He heard himself whispering, the sight below leaving him cold.

Madara snapped his fingers, and the structured ranks broke, collapsing in places and piling onto each other. There was a lag, a space of silence before the sound reached them. Then it did, and they were met with the sounds of combat, screams and the shriek of blades clashing, bodies colliding. The noise swelled and swelled until the mass of ninja looked more like boiling water than a group of people. Obito saw people fall, beheaded or run through or simply trampled, but they would rise to their feet moments later and rejoin the fray. It seemed it would never end, and that thought alone made Obito shudder.

Madara snapped his fingers again, and all motion stopped, the silence roaring across the dark valley as loudly as the shouts from a moment before.

“I’ve  _ won _ ,” Madara crowed, “I’m  _ first _ !” He laughed then, tossing back his mane of hair, bleached bone-white now, just like Obito’s. There was a shrill quality to the laughter that set Obito’s teeth on edge. “I’ve done what you couldn’t,” Madara said, softer now, as if to himself. Obito chanced a glance behind him and was distantly surprised to see that Madara’s attention had indeed turned inward; he was looking down at himself, fitfully grasping and touching his own chest. Beneath the breastplate of Madara’s armour, Obito knew, lay Hashirama’s cells, the grafted tissue thrumming with immense power. The right half of Obito’s body knew that power well, albeit in a diluted form. Life itself – in those grafts, the chakra ran bright and overwhelming, very nearly carried the scent of crushed leaves and sap.

“In this genjutsu, I’ve united every shinobi. To a man. That was our dream, wasn’t it? Look at my world of peace, Hashirama!” Madara was raving to the empty air. The stony calm that Obito had come to know had turned to some pressured kind of madness, intense and fervent as he’d never been before. It fit with the horror all around them, which made sense, he supposed. After all, that madness had created it.

The word  _ Peace _ echoed up as a droning shout from the valley of mindless ninja, reflected in the hundreds of thousands of toneless voices. Obito realized dully that this was Madara’s true dream—this regimented horde, the endless battle. He’d known, through all the intervening years, that Madara’s ideal reality would be something dark and twisted, not the happy utopia of friendship, love, and unlimited success that he’d sold Obito on in his darkest moment. He’d known this, but he could never in a thousand years have imagined  _ this _ world.

It was too simple, in a sense. It was linear; cause and effect—the product of a childlike mind, or the oversimplification of a psychopath, he couldn’t settle on which. But that mind had woven itself into every molecule of this new and awful reality. That mind had become the foundation and firmament of everything that remained.

“You should know some peace before I destroy you, I think,” Madara went on, “See what you’ve helped accomplish before you disappear.” At once, Obito felt a pressure at his back like a shove from an immense hand. He couldn’t hold back the instinctive cry that he made as he was thrown far out over the abyss, or the way his heart leapt into his throat as he gained speed, tumbling limb over limb, and began to fall.

As Obito fell, in that seemingly endless moment, he was aware of three things. First, he noted that the black distant sky with its red moon had one other inhabitant: a faint white light, nearly eclipsed in the pervasive crimson glow. One lonely star. Next, he saw the mass of ninja rushing up to meet him; bloody, sticky hands outstretched, faces indistinguishable but for their gaping mouths. Last, Madara’s voice, close as a caress but taunting from all directions.

“All this for a girl, Obito? All this for someone who hardly knew you existed?” It was taking an awfully long time to fall. Obito hoped that death, or oblivion at least, would finally shut Madara’s terrible voice out. Yet, as the dark valley spread out below him, so close now that he could see the whites of the hoarde’s eyes, it seemed Madara had one final blow to strike: “Such a significant thing for you, and yet having her killed was the easiest thing I’ve accomplished to date.”

A split second away from impact, a raw, bloodthirsty rage erupted in Obito’s heart.

He plunged into the mess below like a dark meteor—jarring impact amidst the toneless whispers of  _ Peace, Peace.  _ There were bodies beneath the bodies, viscous blood so deep it swallowed him whole. It was all dark grasping blindness, the taste of iron filling his nose and mouth. All this was secondary to Obito now, though, as he thrashed and clawed for what he hoped was the surface. His clothing was laden with gore, tangling around him and dragging him down. Fury surged in him, hot and choking.  _ Madara _ . All these years and he had been too trusting to have suspected this degree of treachery. The spiral Zetsu had been far too willing to let him go to Kakashi and Rin’s aid that day. Thinking back, the Kirigakure-nin attack had been far from sensible; a contingent of fifty tracking down two barely-teenaged ninja during a high-stakes war? It made no sense. Still, the rationale hadn’t mattered to him for very long, considering that the moments that followed had broken him so utterly. Madara had masterfully redirected Obito’s cause and purpose to suit his own needs, and Obito had been fool enough to believe he’d had the upper hand all along.

His lungs burning, Obito scrabbled against slippery bodies, feeling hands, faces, feet, and seemingly endless viscous blood. No matter how he tried, it seemed he couldn’t come any closer to reaching the surface. As before, this dreamscape seemed reluctant to let him die freely—it seemed that Madara’s reality preferred to leave him  _ feeling _ like he was dying for as long as possible.  So be it. He was waiting on Madara’s whim, in essence—the moment Madara was done toying with him. But until then?

Until then, Obito was going to do everything in his power to destroy Uchiha Madara, as wholly and completely as possible.

Hatred had become his driving force over the years. It was his inheritance, he supposed, as an Uchiha: to give himself over to the wailing inside his skull, to let his brain craft a cold, certain logic out of a consuming lust for revenge.  _ Love is our greatest weakness _ , his grandmother had told him once,  _ and our greatest strength.  _ In a way, she had been right. Love had become his greatest strength because it fueled this dark and dangerous thing within him, burned away the boy who loved so that a merciless creature could stand in his place.

That creature took over now, compartmentalizing emotions with brutal efficiency. He set aside any sentiment that was not immediately useful. He knew that he had a limited time in which to act, and much to do within it.

First of all, it wouldn’t do to flare his chakra and draw Madara’s attention. Instead, he would have to keep his energies low and subtle. That part wouldn’t be a challenge; he was running low as it was. What was left of the Juubi’s power in him would naturally seek itself out. Next, and much more difficult still, he had to find a way to destabilize something he himself had believed to be the perfect genjutsu.

A basic genjutsu was woven like simple cloth, sliding chakra over and under itself, then cast over the target like a hood. More complex jutsu involved manipulating the flow of chakra in the retina itself, making the target see whatever the caster wanted them to see. At that stage, the belief was still dependent on the victim; the genjutsu could be disrupted if the stimulus was not convincing enough. Advanced genjutsu, though, especially one cast eye-to-eye as the Sharingan was, slid along the surface of the brain like syrup, keyed into the cortex at all levels. Like this, the genjutsu could control not only what one saw but how one  _ felt _ , what one remembered—it could control consciousness itself, and thereby alter reality.

This was Obito’s playing field now; his self-awareness let him tread that filmy surface between the reality that he loathed and the illusion that had been stolen from him. It allowed him to interact with the genjutsu, unable to dispel something so massive entirely, all the while physically keeping its yin energies from coating his brain and taking over. It was only his remaining energy and anger that kept either world at bay. He moved carefully, recalling the spindly-limbed insects that used to skate along the surface of the Nakano River.

Memory of the river brought unwanted thoughts of home—of Hisako dead in the water, her tiny face bloated and blue.  Of Rin,  _ limp-soaked-broken _ in the rain and mire. Of the Academy boys shoving his head in the toilet and holding it down so long he thought his lungs would burst. They felt the same now in dark, metallic wet, clawing past body after body with no end in sight.

The ruthless part of Obito forced those thoughts away. He needed to tease the illusion apart. He needed to create a pocket of space where he could rearrange things and regroup.  To do so, though, he would have to find a weak point. In the strongest genjutsu ever cast.

If he could have done so, Obito would have screamed in frustration. He had no idea where or how to begin.

Just then, something closed around his ankle, and Obito was dragged violently downward. A quick surge of panic hit him—was this Madara? Was this it? He struggled, but the weight of the bodies around him made his movements slow and very taxing. He tried to identify the chakra of whatever was pulling him deeper and deeper, but his attempts to probe felt like they were reflecting off of a mirror. He knew there was something there, but he couldn’t put a name to it. Seconds later he knew why.

He drew a breath, belatedly recognizing that there was air all of a sudden where there had been none before. The grip on his ankle had vanished. He brought up a hand to wipe at his face, spat clotted liquid from his mouth, and opened his eyes.

The first thing he noticed was the subtle red glow. There wasn’t much light at all, only enough to make out that the space was very small, maybe six feet in any direction. The walls, floor, and ceiling—if one could call them that—were barely visible in the gloom, but Obito could see the sticky, shiny contour of bodies, still shifting subtly all around him. They were held back by some invisible force, which effectively created a tiny bubble deep within the living nightmare. The light flickered, and Obito jerked his head up. Looking around, he saw that the light came from a pair of eyes that he recognized well. These were eyes that had burned him. Eyes that knew some of his secrets, even though their original owner had died.

“Sasuke,” Obito said softly, startled by his own voice. He didn’t sound like anyone he knew.

The light flickered again as Sasuke dipped his head and nodded, though a faint ambient light persisted from a source Obito squinted to determine. It was hard; Obito could barely make out Sasuke’s features. “Uchiha… Obito, was it?” Sasuke said, his voice as dead and cold as ever,  “Not ‘Tobi’, not Madara. You were supposed to have died before I was born.”

“That’s what we _all_ thought,” another voice broke in.

Obito realized abruptly why he hadn’t been able to identify the chakra that had pulled him under. Ninja rarely think to detect their own energies. The other light in the space came from a single eye. It was faint, much dimmer than Sasuke’s, but still aglow. Crouched in the close, suffocating dark next to Sasuke was Hatake Kakashi.

Obito could just barely make out the deep, cruel “X” he’d carved across Kakashi’s chest, as well as the darker spot where he’d lanced the Copy-Nin’s liver. Kakashi carried these wounds, even inside his own mind. As Obito struggled with several ugly feelings at once—most he didn’t have names for—Kakashi moved forward, peered at Obito with his own Sharingan, and said, “I’m willing to bet this isn’t what you meant by a perfect reality.”


End file.
